Quote

Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Love
Deserves
Cards
Clean
Deserve
Everybody
Water
Greeting
Tell
Routinely
Time
Greetings

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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
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For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
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... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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